Over at least the past decade, with the drastic drop in price and miniaturization of laptop and notebook computers, vast numbers of individuals have been actively engaged in generating and manipulating their own documents. Although word processing skills vary widely between users, many students and professionals generating/editing documents lack the word processing skill level to take full advantage of the capabilities of the word processing system that they are utilizing.
In an office setting, where a wide range of users, such as journalists, lawyers, agents, and consultants are generating and editing draft documents, old documents are oftentimes utilized as a starting point for drafting new documents. Such old documents are selected for use for a variety of reasons. Many times such documents are selected merely because they contain, for example, common project or address information.
Such old documents that are used as a starting point for creating a new document often include embedded automatic formatting codes, that may have been advantageous in the prior/original document, but which generate unexpected problems in creating and editing the new document. For example, if a document has been set up with a format oriented towards creating an alphabetized outline, when a user strikes an enter key intending to advance to the left hand margin, the system may generate the next letter in the alphabet when no such generation is desired. In other instances, bullets may be generated automatically when not intended by the user. Further, unwanted single spacing, paragraphing, or margin generation may be generated.
Such undesired actions can be extremely frustrating to the typical user. The typical user may have little success in deleting the unwanted formatting codes on either a local paragraph, page, or document-wide basis. Such users are often not familiar enough with their word processing system to appreciate how automatic formatting features are appropriately disabled. Such users are then faced with the frustrating exercise of time and time again, either deleting operations that have occurred and retyping text appropriately, or using an “undo” function or “undo” edit key to initiate a reversal of the automatic formatting operation. An “undo” function or an “undo” edit key is a familiar and conventional feature of many document processing computer applications. For example, spreadsheets and word processors typically allow data entry, such as adding new data, deleting existing data, cut and paste operations, and data formatting to be undone.
Often, a user will repetitively hit the “undo” edit key to reverse the impact of the automatic formatting. In many instances, a user will continue utilizing the undo function until the editing process is complete.
In accordance with an illustrative implementation, a word processing system includes an undo function monitor that monitors the history of a user's use of the undo operation. Depending upon the pattern detected, the system may disable the particular auto-formatting feature that triggered the undesired automatic operation.
In an illustrative embodiment, the system tracks whether a number of undo operations exceeds a programmable threshold. In one illustrative implementation the system also tracks the number of times a user has undone, i.e., reversed, an automatic formatting operation compared with the number of instances where the user has permitted the subject automatic formatting operation to take place. In other implementations, the number of undo operations are tracked on a paragraph, page, and document section basis so that automatic formatting disabling options may be provided taking into account the document context within which such undo operations occurred.
These and other features of the illustrative implementations will become apparent from a review of the drawings of which: